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A few years ago, Murray Partridge realised he was not the most important person in his marriage. He was flicking through a glossy magazine when he stumbled across a photograph of his wife, the jewellery designer Solange Azagury-Partridge.

The picture looked odd. Her arm was jutting out at a strange angle and, to her left, was a blurry, indistinct area of colour. Slowly, the penny dropped.

“I’d been airbrushed out,” he says, when we meet in the kitchen of the family home in West London. “Normally, they just crop me out, but this time, they’d gone to real trouble.”

He was, he realised, married to an Alpha Female. He had been relegated to the role of Beta Male. He started speaking to his friends...